Now, although the dramatist has clearly represented his hero and heroine as persons of middle age, and absorbed in an ambitious enterprise which little admits of any of the of conjugal tenderness, yet the words which drop from Macbeth There is something hideous in the very strength lighter expressions of her mind, that can dive down, like a monster, to such depths of consolation." Now, we must be permitted to point out the strange oversight committed by the writer of these paragraphs, in speaking of those maxims of consolation and tranquillisation which Lady Macbeth addresses for those especial purposes to her agitated husband under those peculiar circumstances, as if, in her own breast, she held them for all-consolatory truths. Not only the very sleepwalking scene in question, but various other passages which we have had occasion to cite in our preceding pages, prove abundantly that they are anything but satisfactory to her own conscience. Mr. Campbell thus concludes : "She is a splendid picture of evil, nevertheless, a sort of sister of Milton's Lucifer; and, like him, we surely imagine her externally majestic and beautiful. Mrs. Siddons's idea of her having been a delicate and blonde beauty, seems to me to be a pure caprice. The public would have ill exchanged for such a representative of Lady Macbeth the dark locks and the eagle eyes of Mrs. Siddons." 3 With all submission, however, to the biographer's judgment, this notion of the great actress as to Shakespeare's conception of Lady Macbeth's personal appearance, is anything but capricious; she assigns a valid reason for it. After imagining the heroine as one "in whose composition are associated all the subjugating powers of intellect, and all the charms and graces of personal beauty," ✓ she thus proceeds : 66 my dearest love," "dearest chuck," "sweet remembrancer," &c. do imply a very genuinely feminine attraction on the part of his wife. As for mere complexion, in this instance, as in most others, Shakespeare, perhaps for obvious reasons of theatrical convenience, appears to have given no particular indication; but that he conceived his Lady Macbeth as decidedly and even softly feminine in person, results not only from the language addressed to her by her husband, but from all that we know of those principles of harmonious contrast which Shakespeare invariably follows in his greatest works. In the present instance it pleased him to reverse the usual order of things, by attributing to his hero what is commonly regarded as the feminine irritability of fancy and infirmity of resolution. To render this peculiarity of character more striking, he has contrasted it with the most undoubted physical courage, personal strength and prowess; -in short, he has combined in Macbeth an eminently masculine person with a spirit in other respects eminently feminine, but utterly wanting the feminine generosity of affection. To this character, thus contrasted within itself, he has opposed a female character presenting a contrast exactly the reverse of the former. No one doubts that he has shown us in the spirit of Lady Macbeth that masculine firmness of will which he has made wanting in her husband. The strictest analogy, then, would lead him to complete the harmonizing contrast of the two characters, by enshrining this "undaunted mettle" of hers in a frame as exquisitely feminine as her husband's is magnificently manly. This was requisite, also, in order to make her taunts of Macbeth's irresolution operate with "You will probably not agree with me as to the character of that beauty; yet, perhaps, this difference of opinion will be entirely attributable the fullest intensity. Such sentiments from to the difficulty of your imagination disengaging the lips of what is called a masculine-lookitself from that idea of the person of her representative which you have been so long accustomed stomed ing or speaking woman, have little moral to contemplate. According to my notion, it is energy, compared with what they derive from of that character which I believe is generally al- the ardent utterance of a delicately feminine VOL. XLI. 3 voice and feature. Mrs. Siddons, then, we believe, judged more correctly in this matter than the public, who, as her biographer tells us, would have ill exchanged her "dark locks and eagle eyes" for such a Lady Macbeth as she herself imagined. In this particular her sagacious reading of Shakespeare is no less remarkable than her womanly candour; while the public, it is plain, have been led by nothing but that force of association which her own powerful personation had impressed upon them. So powerful, indeed, was it, as to lead Mr. cally Campbell, in conclusion, to tell us emphati "In some other characters which Mrs. Siddons performed, the memory of the old, or the imagination of the young, might possibly conceive her to have had a substitute; but not in Lady Macbeth. The moment she seized the part, she identified her image with it in the minds of the living generation." The fact of this thorough identification in the public mind makes it incumbent on us to show the divergence of Mrs. Siddons's embodiment of the character from Shakespeare's delineation of it, not only as we have done already, from à priori evidence afforded by her own account of how she endeavoured to play it, but also from the most authentic traditions as to her actual expression of the part. In doing this, we must limit our examination of that great performance to these two particulars;-first, the fallacious impression given by the actress as to the moral relation in general subsisting between Lady Macbeth and her husband; and secondly, the like erroneous interpreting of the relation between the lady's own conscience and the great criminal act to which she is accessary. All accounts, then, of Mrs. Siddons's acting in the earlier scenes, concur in assuring us that she did most effectively represent the heroine as we have seen, from her written remarks upon the character, that she endeavoured to represent her, as a woman, we repeat, "inherently selfish and imperious-not devoted to the wish and purpose of her husband, but remorselessly determined to work him to the fulfilment of her own." The three great passages which most prominently develope this conception, are, that in which Lady Macbeth takes upon herself the execution of the murderous enterprise; that where she banishes Macbeth's apprehensions of odium by her taunts, and his fears of retribution by suggesting the expedient of casting suspicion on the sleeping attendants; and finally, that in which she endeavours to calm his agitation after the murder. After perusing the passages above cited from Mrs. Siddons's Remarks, we may well give credit, for instance, to Mr. Boaden's assurance, in describing her first performance of Lady Macbeth in London, that she delivered the speech "Oh, never Shall sun that morrow see," &c. in such a manner that "Macbeth himself (Smith) sank under her at once, and she quitted the scene with an effect which cannot be described; "*-that is, she assumed the tone and air, not of earnest entreaty, which alone Shakespeare's heroine could have employed on this occasion, but of im perious injunction; so that Macbeth's representative, instead of complacently acquiescing, as Shakespeare's conception requires, seemed to yield to her will in pure helplessness. So, again, in the scene where the lady overcomes her husband's apprehensive shrinking from the actual deed, the same theatrical historian informs us : "Filled from the crown to the toe with direst cruelty, the horror of the following sentence seemed bearable from its fitness to such a being. But I yet wonder at the energy of both utterance and action with which it was accompanied : 'I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck'd my nipple from its boneless gums, And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this.' There was no qualifying with our humanity in the tone or gesture. This really beautiful and interesting actress did not at all shrink from standing before us the true and perfect image of the greatest of all natural and moral depravations-a fiend-like woman." دو 18 10 S Te 00 by an eloquent writer in a recent number of this personation, the actress's looking and 'Blackwood's Magazine,' who, in recording his admiring reminiscences of Mrs. Siddons's Lady Macbeth, assures us that, in the murder scene, "her acting was that of a triumphant fiend."* But, in examining the play, we have speaking the heroine of antique tragedy was out of place. A somnambulist, from the workings of a troubled conscience, is a thing peculiar to the romantic drama, and impossible in the classic. A person such as Mrs. Siddons's acting represented Lady Macbeth shown how Shakespeare exhibits the hero- to be, would have been quite incapable of that "slumbry agitation" in which we behold ine as anything but triumphant in the perpetration of the deed, her husband's ruminations upon which draw from her an anticipation of that remorseless distraction which is destined to destroy her.. We have shown, too, how remote she is from that bitterness of contempt which Mrs. Siddons expressed with such intensity, but which policy no less than feeling must have banished from Shakespeare's heroine while she felt her very self-preservation to depend upon her soothing the nervous agitation of her husband. Shakespeare, in short, from the very commencement of Lady Macbeth's share in the action, has exhibited in her, not that "statue-like simplicity" of motive for which Mr. Campbell contends, and which Mrs. Siddons strove to render, but a continual = struggle, between her compunction for the criminal act, and her devotion to her hus-grand voice, her fixed and marble counte band's ambitious purpose. This conscious struggle should give to the opening invoca tion "Come, come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts," &c. a tremulous anxiety as well as earnestness of ✓ expression, very different from what we find → recorded respecting this part of Mrs. Siddons's performance : "When the actress," says Mr. Boaden, "in She nance, and her silent step, gave the impression of a supernatural being, the genius of an ancient oracle-a tremendous Nemesis." voking the destroying ministers, came to the Lady Macbeth, as exhibiting the highest In all this we perceive the gesture of one, not imploring the spirits of murder, as Shakespeare's heroine does, but commanding them, according to Mrs. Siddons's conception. The action, in short, is not suited to the word. The same must be said of her performance of the great sleep-walking scene, though regarded as Mrs. Siddons's grandest triumph in this part. Here, of all other passages in "She was a living Melpomene," says the same writer in conclusion; and this is evidently what Mr. Campbell means by saying "she was Tragedy personified." But the muse of the classic tragedy, and the muse of the romantic, of which the Shakespearian is the summit, are personages exceedingly different. They who cite Mrs. Siddons's development of her histrionic powers, are perfectly right; but when they speak of it as transcendently proving her fitness for interpreting Shakespeare, they are as decidedly wrong. It is not "a statuc-like simplicity," to repeat Mr. Campbell's phrase, that makes the essence of the Shakespearian drama, but a picturesque complexity to which Mrs. Siddons's massive person and sculptured genius were as essentially repugnant as they were akin to the spirit of the antique. Her genius, it has been somewhere well observed, been conscious, rather epic than tragic, ra was, in fact, as she herself seems to have ther didactic than dramatic, rather Miltonian than Shakespearian. Justice to Mrs. Siddons, and justice to Shakespeare, alike demand that this should be clearly and universally understood. The best homage to genius like hers, as to genius like his, must be, to * Marston ; or, the Memoirs of a Statesman.' _ appreciate it, not only adequately, but truly Blackwood's Magazine, June, 1843, p. 710. After all that we have said, it may well be supposed that we have little desire to see or hear of any future representation of this play which shall not be conducted on the principle of thorough fidelity to the spirit of its great author. He, indeed, thought proper to exhibit in its hero the most poetical of selfishly ambitious assassins; but could little contemplate that his "black Macbeth" was destined to be converted into the sentimental villain of our modern stage-a conception much more worthy of a Kotzebue than of a Shakespeare. It is high time that this national disgrace should be wiped away. The operatic insertions, founded, as we have seen, upon a total inversion of the dramatist's own meaning and purpose in the preternatural agency, must be utterly banished-they are as insufferable here as they would be in 'Richard,' or in 'Othello,' or in Hamlet.' The suppressed scenes and passages must be restored. And, above all, the two leading characters must be truly personated. Then, but not till then, shall we see the moral of this great tragedy resume, in our theatres, its pristine dignity. Our sympathies will no longer be vulgarly and mischievously appealed to in behalf of a falsely-supposed passive victim of demoniacal instigations, but will find that natural and healthy channel into which the great moralist has really directed them. To return to the consideration with which we have opened the present paper, we shall see on the stage, as we do in the text of Shakespeare, that when a character of the highest nervous irritability, but utterly devoid of sympathy, is once stimulated to the pursuit of a selfishly and criminally ambitious project, its career will of necessity be as destructive to the nearest domestic ties as to political and social security. Lady Macbeth, in short, falls hardly less a victim of Macbeth's selfish cupidity than Lady Macduff herself. Above all, we shall cease to have obtruded upon us that low and commonplaće poetical justice which consists in making every sort of criminal be punished by repentance in this life. Shakespeare knew much better. It is one of his greatest titles to the gratitude of mankind, that he shrunk not from showing his auditors that there are certain kinds of villains who can never know remorse, because they were born incapable of sympathy. One of these is, the blunt, honest-looking knave, whom he has portrayed in Iago: another is, the poctically whining villain, whom he has exhibited in Macbeth. The mighty artist wasted not his moralizing on persuading knaves to be honest; he expended it more profitably, in teaching the honest man to see through the subtlest and most impenetrable mask of the knave. G. F. ** We are the more encouraged to hope for a just theatrical rendering of this great creation, by the fact that we possess a rising Shakespearian actress of the highest promise. We allude to Miss Helen Faucit, the development of whose histrionic genius is one of the happiest results of Mr. Macready's laudable and vigorous endeavour to restore the dignity of our metropolitan stage. Among the wide range of Shakespearian characters in which this young lady has already exhibited such various powers, it is her personation of the Lady Constance in the splendid revival of King John,' which made so large a figure in the last Drury-lane season, that peculiarly, demands attention in reference to our more immediate subject. In this part, as in that of Lady Macbeth, the most respectable efforts since Mrs. Siddons's time had never amounted to anything beyond a vastly inferior expression of Mrs. Siddons's conception of the character, to which the stage, as well as the audience, were accustomed to bow with a sort of religious faith and awe. What that conception was, and wherein it differed from the true Shakespearian idea, we find so distinctly stated in two recent numbers of The Athenæum," that to them we take the liberty of referring our readers. The bias which the peculiar character of her genius gave to her personation of the heroine of King John' will be found strictly analogous to that which marked her representation of Macbeth's consort. She made strong-willed ambition the ruling motive of Constance, rather than maternal affection. But Miss Faucit, led, it should seem, by that intuitive sympathy of genius which has guided her happy embodiment of other Shakespearian creations, upon which the great actress of the Kemble school had not so powerfully set her stamp, has courageously but wisely disregarded theatrical prescription in the matter, has followed steadily the unsullied light of Shakespeare's words, and so has found for herself, and shown to her audience, that feeling, not pride, is the mainspring of the character. force which Shakespeare exhibits in the eloquence of Constance (we borrow the words of the writer last referred to) is not the hard force of an arrogant, imperious termagant, such as we see in his Queen ( Elinor, but the elastic force that springs from "The 12 11 and person having all the vigour of a character at once so intellectual, so poetical, and so essentially feminine as that of Constance. To the ex-th pression of this highest and most genuine tragie force, Miss Faucit shows her powers to be not only fully equal, but peculiarly adapted. She has that truest histrionic strength which consists in an ample share of physical power in the ordinary sense, combined with exquisite modulation of tone and flexibility of feature-by turns the firm and the variable expressiveness of figure, voice, and eye." The result has been, that her personation of this great character has been truer than that of her great predecessor to "that spirit of bold and beautiful contrast which is in the very essence of ita development, as it is in that of the whole Shake spearian drama." دو It would, therefore, be most interesting to se this rising actress exercise her unbiassed judgmen and her flexible powers upon the personation c Lady Macbeth, in lieu of that mistaken interpreta tion which, in Mrs. Siddons's hands, however objec tionable as an illustration of Shakespeare, wa grand and noble in itself, but which, in those of he later imitators, has become merely harsh and di gusting. Nor would it be interesting only; would be highly important towards disabusing th February 11th and 18th, 1843. public mind of that vitiated moral with which the corrupt representation of this play has so long in fected it. Herein we see the truly national import ance of Shakespearian acting, no less than of spearian criticism. How much our national reputation is concerned in a more intelligent cultivation of the latter, it is needless now to contend, as the fact is universally admitted. But the degree in which the current state of Shakespearian acting constantly operates, for good or for evil, in illustration or in perversion, upon the reader and the literary critic of Shakespeare, seems less generally understood. Yet this operation is not the less certain, nor is it difficult to assign its cause. We find it in the one great fact, "that the man who, of all men known to us, possessed the truest and most pervading insight into every condition of the human mind and heart, was trained in dramatic composition upon the very board-that the great poet and the great manager grew as one that the great artist whom they combined to form, composed im mediately for The very faculties of eyes and ears.' How much this constant writing, or rather, we should say, creating, to a living and present audience, must have contributed to that wonderfully concentrated force, and that expressive fitness for dramatic effect, which are found in every part of his action, character, and dialogue, it needs little reflection to discover." But the intense depth and subtlety of meaning-the boundless pregnancy of indication the "too much conceiving," as Milton says-which is consequently found in the written text, renders the thorough understanding of it the more dependent on the truth of theatrical interpretation. The case of the 'Macbeth, as we have shown in the foregoing pages, illustrates this dependence most remarkably. It would have been utterly impossible that one critic after another should have perpetuated so false an interpretation of the great dramatist's meaning as we have shown them to have given, had they not come to the consideration of his text prepossessed by the perverted stage impressions of their youth. On a future occasion we may trace out in detail the practical consequences of this significant proposition. For the present, we must conclude with recommending briefly, but most earnestly, to the consideration of our readers, that the highest literary as well as dramatic honour of our nation demands, not only that histrionic genius such as we have here pointed out should receive the most liberal encouragement, but that our whole theatrical system, "as by law established," should be considered with a serious view to remove those barbarous obstacles which it confessedly opposes to a prosperous cultivation of Shakespearian acting. ART. II. 1. The Hand-Book of Taste, or how to observe Works of Art, especially Cartoons, Pictures, and Statues. By Fabius Pictor. Longman. 2. The Present State of Ecclesiastical Architectare in England. By A. Welby Pugin. C. Dolman, 61 New Bond street. exciting more attention in England than the present state of the Fine Arts, and few on which more has been said and written; but still it does not appear that any satisfactory conclusion has been arrived at on the subject, or that either the public or the artists themselves understand better what is wanted, or what would be the best means of improving their condition or enabling Englishmen to do something more creditable to the nation than has hitherto been produced. In the meanwhile the demand for art is as universal as the interest it excites, and whether it be for the statue or painting with which the rich man ornaments his dwelling, or for the 'Penny Magazine' or 'Illustrated News, which find their way into the poorest cottage, every class are enjoying the luxury; and it is of an importance not easily overrated that a right direction should be given to this new-born taste in the nation, working for good or evil to an extent which defies the calculation of the boldest intellect. It is not, however, we fear, in this point of view that the government at present regard the question; and the parliamentary committees that have been appointed, and the royal commissions that have been issued, seemed to have conceived that it was only the wounded vanity of the nation at seeing herself surpassed in art by Bavaria and other continental states, that made her now demand rescue from the disgrace; and the consequence is, that, having ascertained that art was at a singularly low ebb in this country (which all the world knew before they were appointed), they have determined to follow in the steps of the Germans, and try and rival what they conceive to be the splendid school of art that has recently arisen there. The experiment is now being proceeded with, and though it would be presumption to prophesy that it cannot be successful, we have very strong doubts of its realizing the expectations of its sanguine pro moters. At the recent exhibition of cartoons that took place in Westminster Hall in consequence of this resolution, the nation were astonished and delighted to find that English artists could produce as good designs as either the French or Germans, and all have been willing to hail with joy the new era thus opened to art. They have not paused to consider that what could so easily be done by some dozens of artists who never before thought on the subject, or never attempted that style of art, must indeed be a very small and very easy exercise of intellect. They, indeed, who agree with the There are few subjects which are just now committee, that, after rewarding the original |
